Parenting in a new world: migration, social class, and parenting, and links to academic outcomes in China

Abstract

Existing research has conceptualized educational inequalities between migrant and urban youth in China primarily as an issue of differential access to education. Focusing on parenting practices and the intersection of migrant and social class status—and in particular parental education—we use a novel dataset of six-year-olds in Shanghai and show that although migrants, on average, use less effective parenting practices than urbanites overall, these differences reverse, or lessen, after taking parental education into account. Moreover, parental education is more important for both parenting and children’s education outcomes for migrant families than urban families, suggesting the differential importance of social class for migrant groups.

Notes

1 In this manuscript, we refer to rural migrants as migrants.

2 A third hukou category, jumin, was recently introduced that has no geographic basis, although few individuals are designated as this category (Reform of Household Registration System) and none in the data used here.

3 For example, in the data used in these analyses, while 82.1 percent of migrant fathers do not have a college degree, 25.1% of urbanites also do not have a college degree. In fact, a similar percentage of migrant and urban fathers have only a high school degree: 19.8% of migrants and 16.5% of urbanites.

4 Scholars have noted the geographic complexity of studying urban China (Davis et al. 1995) given how rapidly areas are changing. Therefore, it is difficult to conceptualize a representative Shanghai sample given that it is China’s largest city and hosts its largest migrant population. The districts were chosen to represent a range of areas where migrants and urbanites reside.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng

Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng is an associate professor of International Education in the Department of Applied Statistics, Social Sciences, and Humanities in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Development, and Education, New York University. His research focuses on immigration and migration in the US and China and the educational inequalities that manifest in these contexts.

Erin Godfrey

Erin Godfrey is an associate professor of Applied Psychology in the Psychology and Social Intervention program in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Development, and Education, New York University. She uses theories and methods form social, developmental and community psychology to examine how individuals interact with, understand, and are influenced by the social, economic and political systems in which they are embedded.

Jason Rarick

Jason Rarick is an advanced doctoral student in the Applied Psychology program at New York University.